Before I start in earnest, we should take a minute: is everyone okay? Everyone made it through last night's
Breaking Bad without hyperventilating or seizing or turning to meth to find a comparable rush for when the show ends in three weeks? Good, then I have a couple thoughts on this episode and the show leading up to this point. First thought: this show is less about Walt exposing the evil that is latent in people than it is about chaos and how people deal with it. Vince Gilligan's quote about making a show that showed one man's transformation from Mr Chips to Scarface has been repeated endlessly as a shorthand way of understanding the show. While Walt has had his Scarface moments (the showdown with Gus, the prison murders, etc), but this season has made it seem that for Walt, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The scene where Walt buries his money earlier in the season has started a trend in these past few weeks: Walt is alone, riddled with cancer once again, laboring at a seemingly absurd task in the same exact spot in the desert where he first cooked with Jesse. Even the glow of the taillights recalled imagery from the first scene between Walt, Jesse, and Saul from the second season. Since then, we've seen even more of the Heisenberg exterior crack. With Jesse and Hank on a warpath, we've seen more of the frenzied Walt than we have in a long time: Walt's facial expression as he rushes to the car wash to grab his gun is the same expression he wears as he waits for what he thinks is imminent doom in the pilot. While we're on the pilot, Walt is again in the same spot in the desert when he sees the dirt road kicking up dust, and, assuming things had changed and he wasn't waiting for law enforcement, he calls Jack and the neo-Nazis, only to realize that once again it was the law that was on their way out, the only difference is that this time they're actually coming for him. This is all a long winded way of saying that we should be careful when we talk about any sort of Mr Chips to Scarface transformation, because the epic shootout last night drove home the fact that Walt is as impotent as he ever was (those shots of him squirming around in the car trying to warn Hank were wrenching, weren't they?) and that he hasn't been in control so much as one step ahead of the criminal world he couldn't ever control. As we come down the home stretch, this show seems more than ever not about transformation but chance. Jesse has always had a tougher time dealing with the world than anyone in the show, and has lapsed into intense meth-fueled benders about once a season. He's dabbled this season, but his decision to work with Hank was him throwing a lifeline out to some stable force (the law) to help him out of the muck. What he didn't know, of course, was that Hank has descended further and further into Walt's world of chaos. Hank, in most ways, has the second worst hand dealt to him by the powers that be, but he's always been a relatively stable presence in that he's committed to the law. He, like Walt, has had a pretty respectable good luck streak (catching Fring, randomly deciding to read some Walt Whitman on the toilet), but had maintained distance from the hubris that good luck caused in Walt until now. Speaking of Walt, there's no better example of what a few lucky breaks in the chaos of the universe can do to a guy. Walt's world is pure chaos for most of the series, but especially after he kills Fring's two drug dealers. Going back to the first season, though, for what seemed like the first time in his life, Walt got on a hot streak after the first couple cooks with Jesse, and since then every certain death scenario has resulted in him coming out unscathed. We see in Walt someone who is at the mercy of the universe more than most (cancer, son with cerebral palsy, huge missed opportunities, etc) but believes that all of his luck (good and bad) is his own doing. He checks the Grey Matter stock every week as though he should have foreseen the company's eventual outlandish success, he says to a fellow cancer patient to never relinquish control of anything to cancer, as if that were at all possible, especially for someone with stage three lung cancer. His alter-ego is ironically appropriate in this context, which I'm sure someone smarter than I am will get a lot of mileage out of. Imagine Walt playing blackjack for six hours and getting dealt a seventeen every hand, hitting, and ending up with twenty or twenty one every time, then believing that it was all his doing. That's enough to give anyone a big head. It doesn't seem to me that over the course of the series he's unleashed some inner evil, but instead it was just that every time he gambled he won, so he kept doubling down (and yes, only after typing that out did I remember that the White's initial story to Hank and Marie about their sudden windfall was that Walt was a superhuman blackjack player, but all the better). From the start it was clear that Walt affords himself an unrealistic amount of agency, which is why he's such a miserable sad sack until his diagnosis and why he's so confident, sociopathic, and occasionally insane by the time Gus Fring wants to kill him.
Second thought: this show has officially transcended the "I'm rooting for this guy" dynamic. Reviews of and reactions to this episode have included a lot of "oh man I was rooting for Hank," which I think is irrelevant in the
Breaking Bad universe.
The Wire made us kind of root for everyone (at least until Marlo showed up),
The Sopranos made us root for one man (I don't care what David Chase says), but is it possible that
Breaking Bad will leave us with no one to root for, and will that even matter? I'm not talking about the imminent death of Hank and Gomie (I mean, they're definitely dying, right?) but about the fact that Hank is gradually losing it with this case. His ploy to get Walt out in the desert to his money was brilliant, cunning, and probably illegal. He couldn't care less when Gomie suggests that Walt may kill Jesse when they tried to set up a meeting in the last episode, and that little wave he gives Walt before Jack shows up may be the lasting image of him from the show. His pride got the best of him just like Walt's has continually gotten the best of him. Jesse, for as sympathetic as he's become throughout the course of the show, has gotten his hands almost as dirty as Walt has. Not to mention how devastating his DEA mediated confrontation with Walt was in the latest episode (which, wow, Cranston and director Michelle Maclaren, just wow). The Lambert sisters have become just as bloodthirsty as either of their husbands have ever been, and Junior just hasn't been a big enough part of the show to draw all of our sympathies from each of the other characters. In a sense, getting rid of rooting interests is like what the writers did with the flash forward at the beginning of the season: they showed us the answer, then used the next fifteen episodes to show us the process of getting there. Without rooting for anyone, we're forced to watch the plot unfold as a process, which is somehow more nerve wracking than worrying about your favorite character getting killed. This also definitely contributes to making the
Breaking Bad world seem so chaotic: people evolve for better and worse and buck expectations, leaving us with a little of ourselves invested in each character yet apprehensive about all of them as well. So let's all enjoy the next three hours for what they are: chaos. Beautiful, beautiful chaos.